A brief history and development trend of multimedia technology based on multimedia application

In the process of human development, newspaper may be the first important mass media, which mainly uses text content, graphics and images.

1895, Russia? Is it? Popov and Italian engineer Guillermo Marconi independently realized the first radio transmission in Russia and Italy respectively. Later, in the month of190165438+February, Marconi completed the radio communication across the Atlantic with a distance of 3700 kilometers. Radio was originally invented as telegraph, and now it has become the most important audio broadcasting medium.

Television is a new media that appeared in the 20th century. It brought video and changed the world of group communication.

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) put forward the Memex system in the paper "As We Think" published in 1945: the library stores all kinds of information in microfilm, and the links between bibliographies can jump automatically. Memex provides a way for any piece of information to automatically select another piece of information at will. Moreover, it is more important to link these two pieces of information together. This is the concept of hypertext.

Some concepts and methods of multimedia technology originated in the 1960s. In 1965, Ted Nelson proposed a method of organizing related texts encountered in texts, which was used to process text files on computers, and coined a word for this method, called "hypertext". Different from the traditional way, hypertext organizes the text in a nonlinear way, which enables the computer to respond to people's thinking and obtain the needed information conveniently. The multimedia information on the World Wide Web adopts the idea and technology of hypertext, which constitutes a hypermedia space on a global scale.

From 65438 to 0967, nicholas negroponte organized a construction machine group at MIT.

From 65438 to 0969, Nelson and Van Dam developed a hypertext editor at Brown University.

During the period of 1976, the construction machinery group of MIT presented various media to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Multimedia technology was realized in the mid-1980s. 1984, when developing Macintosh computer, Apple creatively used bitmap, window, icon and other technologies in order to increase graphics processing function and improve human-computer interaction interface. The graphical user interface (GUI) brought by these series of improvements is very popular with users. The introduction of mouse as an interactive device, combined with GUI, greatly facilitates the operation of users. 1987, Apple introduced a Hypercard, which made it easier for Macintosh to use, learn and process multimedia information, and won unanimous praise from computer users.

1985, Microsoft introduced Windows, which is a multi-user graphical operating environment. Windows uses mouse-driven graphical menus, ranging from Windows 1.x, Windows 3.x, Windows NT and Windows 9x to Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It is a multi-layer window operating system with multimedia function and friendly user interface.

1985, Commodore Company of the United States introduced the world's first multimedia computer Amiga system. Amiga uses Motorola M68000 microprocessor as CPU, and is equipped with three special chips, namely Agnus 8370, Pzula 8364 and Denise 8362, which are graphics processing chips developed by Commodore Company. Amiga has its own special operating system, which can handle multi-tasks, and has the functions of drop-down menu, multi-window and icon.

1985, Negroponte and wisner established the Media Lab of MIT.

1986, Philips of the Netherlands and Sony of Japan jointly developed and launched CD-I(Compact Disc Interactive), and announced the data format of the optical disc used in this system. This technology has a great impact on the development of mass storage devices, and has been recognized as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The emergence of large-capacity optical discs provides an effective means for storing and representing high-quality digital media such as sound, text, graphics and audio.

The research of interactive audio technology has also attracted people's attention. Since 1983, ABC's RCA Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey has organized more than 40 experts in computer, radio, television and signal processing to develop interactive digital video systems. Based on computer technology, it uses standard optical discs to store and retrieve data, such as still images, moving images and sounds. After four years of research, this technology, called DVI(Digital Video Interactive), was demonstrated at the second CD-ROM International Conference in March, 1987. This is the rudiment of multimedia technology. The essential difference between DVI and CD-I is that the encoder and decoder of the former are all placed in a microcomputer, which controls the calculation and integrates color TV technology and computer technology; The latter is only designed for playing video signals recorded on optical disks and coded according to CD-I compression coding method (similar to the later VCD players). This is also the reason why people immediately lost interest in CD-I after DVI technology appeared.

Although it is not easy to know who and when the word "multimedia" was first used, IEEE Computer Magazine published the complete works of Multimedia Communication for the first time in June 1985+00, which is the earliest source that can be found in the literature.

The emergence of multimedia technology has aroused great repercussions around the world, which clearly shows the revolutionary development direction of information processing and transmission (that is, communication) technology. 1987 international interactive audio-visual industry association was established. When the organization changed its name to Interactive Multimedia Association in 199 1, more than 200 companies from 15 countries had joined.

The American radio company RCA later sold the interactive digital video system DVI to the American General Electric Company (GE). 1987, Intel bought this technology from GE. After improvement, DVI technology developed into a popular commodity in early 1989. Later, in cooperation with IBM, Action Media 750 multimedia development platform was launched at Comdex/Fall'89 exhibition. The hardware system of the platform consists of special boards such as audio board, video board and multifunctional board, and its hardware AVSS: Audio and video support system (AVSS) based on DOS system. 199 1 year, Intel and IBM jointly launched the improved Action Media II. In this system, the hardware part is concentrated on two special plug-ins of acquisition board and user board, which has high integration; The software adopts AVK audio and video kernel (AVK) based on Windows. Action Media II has been greatly improved in expansibility, portability and video processing ability. Since 1990s, multimedia technology has gradually matured. Multimedia technology has shifted from focusing on research and development to focusing on application.

1989, Tim Berners-Lee suggested the establishment of the World Wide Web to CERN.

1990, K. Hooper Woolsey established the Apple Multimedia Lab with 100 people.

Because multimedia technology is a comprehensive technology, its practical application involves the technical cooperation of many industries such as computer, electronics, communication, film and television, and the application objects of its products involve both researchers, ordinary consumers and users at all levels, so standardization is the key to the practical application of multimedia technology. In the standardization stage, the research department and the development department first put forward their own schemes, and then through analysis, testing, comparison and synthesis, summed up the best and most convenient standards for application and promotion, so as to guide the development of multimedia products.

1990 10 and MPC 1.0 standards were put forward at the multimedia developers' conference held by Microsoft and several manufacturers. 1993, MPMC (Multimedia PC Marketing Committee), composed of dozens of software and hardware companies such as IBM and Intel, issued MPC 2.0, a performance standard for multimedia personal computers. 1In June, 1995, MPMC announced the new technical specification MPC 3.0 for multimedia personal computers.

1992, which realizes the network M-bone audio playback for the first time.

1993, NCSA (National Supercomputing Application Center) of the University of Illinois developed the first mosaic of World Wide Web browsers.

1994, jim clark and mark anderson developed Netscape, a web browser.

1995, Java, a platform-independent application development language, came out.

One of the key technologies of multimedia technology is the compression (encoding) and decompression (decoding) algorithm of multimedia data.

CCITT Group 2(G2) proposed by CCITT, the predecessor of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is a very early compression scheme for fax systems. Then CCITT Group III (1980) and CCITT Group IV (1984).

In the 20th century, the application of multimedia has undergone earth-shaking changes, and various enterprises are constantly updating and developing in the field of multimedia application. Multimedia has become an indispensable part of people's life and business activities. Shenzhen Yingfutong Technology Co., Ltd., a military enterprise in the multimedia field, launched the enterprise multimedia application network in order to get higher and faster development in multimedia business, which greatly promoted the business volume of enterprise multimedia design and production and maintained the rapid development of the enterprise.

The standard for still images is T.8 1 of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The main standard of still images is called JPEG standard (ISO/IEC 109 18). It is an international standard for monochrome and color, multi-gray continuous-tone still images formulated by JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) jointly formulated by ISO and IEC. This standard was adopted in 199 1 and became the ISO/IEC 109 18 standard, which is called "digital compression coding of multi-gray static images".

The main standards of video/moving images are MPEG-1(ISO/IEC1172) and MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13865432) formulated by the moving image expert group under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standards equivalent to MPEG- 1 and 4 include H.26 1(Px64) for video conferencing and H.263 for videophone in moving images.

The official name of MPEG- 1 standard is Information Technology-Television Image and Audio Coding of Digital Storage Media with Data Rate of 1.5Mbit/s, which was adopted by ISO/IEC in 199 1 and consists of five parts: system, video, audio, conformance testing and software simulation. The official name of MPEG-2 standard is "information technology-universal coding of moving images and sound information". The basic bit rate of MPEG-2 is 4~8Mbps, and the highest bit rate is 15Mbps. MPEG-2 includes nine parts: system, video, audio, conformance testing, software simulation, digital storage media command and control (DSM-CC) extension protocol, advanced audio coding (AAC), system decoder real-time interface extension protocol and DSM-CC conformance extension testing. The official name of MPEG-4 standard is "very low rate audio-visual coding". Version 2000 of DMIF for system, video, audio and transmission has been completed, and version 200 1 of reference software has been passed on 200 1.

MPEG also participated in the formulation of HDTV standard. Later, because MPEG-2 can meet the requirements of HDTV images, this work stopped in July 1992. 1995165438+1On October 28th, ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) submitted the digital television (DTV) standard to the FCC Advisory Committee, and recommended it as an advanced broadcast television standard.

In multimedia digital communication (including video conference, etc.). ), formulated a series of international standards, called H series standards. This series of standards is divided into two generations. H.320, H.32 1 and H.322 are the first generation standards, and they are all based on H.320 on the integrated services digital network (ISDN) adopted by 1990. H.323, H.324 and H.3 10 are the second generation, which use the new H.245 control protocol and support a series of improved multimedia encoders and decoders.

On the basis of MPEG- 1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has put forward a new standard MPEG-7, whose official name is "Multimedia Content Description Interface", and its goal is to produce a standard for describing multimedia content data. In order to meet the needs of real-time and non-real-time applications, it is different from waveform-based and compression-based representations, such as MPEG- 1 and MPEG-2, and also different from object-based representations, such as MPEG-4. Instead, the description of various types of multimedia information is standardized, and the description is associated with the described content to realize fast and effective search. It consists of seven parts, namely, system, description definition language (DDL), video, audio, multimedia description scheme, reference software and conformance testing. This standard was put forward in 1998 10, and was finally completed and published in 200 1 year.

Another new standard is MPEG-2 1 standard (ISO/IEC 18034), whose formal name is "Open Core". The goal of MPEG-2 1 is to transparently integrate technologies supporting multimedia resources distributed in a wide range of networks and devices to support multiple functions, including content creation, content production, content distribution, content consumption and use, content packaging, intellectual property management and protection, content identification and description, financial management, user privacy, terminal and network resource abstraction, content representation and event reporting. The MPEG-2 1 open core will determine and define the key elements needed to support the multimedia transmission chain, their relationships and the operations they support.

In addition, ISO has issued a unified standard for the specification and data format of the optical disk storage system, the core equipment of multimedia technology, especially for the various performances of popular optical disk drives and various audio and video optical disks based on optical disk drives. With the formulation and application of various multimedia standards, the development of multimedia industry has been greatly promoted. Many multimedia standards and implementation methods (such as JPEG, MPEG, etc. ) has been realized at the chip level and put into the market as a mature commodity. At the same time, various software systems and tools related to the multimedia field have mushroomed. These not only solve the problems that must be solved in the development of multimedia, but also provide reliable technical support for the popularization and application of multimedia, and promote the rapid development of multimedia industry.

One of the representative events of vigorous development is the development of multimedia chips and processors. 1997 1 10 In October, Intel Corporation of the United States introduced the Pentium processor with MMX technology, making it the standard of multimedia computers. Pentium processor has three main features in architecture: (1) adding instructions to make computer hardware have multimedia processing function (adding 57 multimedia instruction sets), which can process video, audio and graphic data more effectively. (2) SIMD (single instruction multiple data processing) reduces the time-consuming multi-cycle in video, audio, graphics and animation processing. (3) The larger on-chip cache reduces the number of times the processor accesses the off-chip low-speed memory. Pentium processor doubled the running speed of multimedia and began to replace some common function cards.

In addition to Pentium processors using MMX technology, there are also technologies such as AGP specification, MPEG-2, AC-97, PC-98, 2D/3D graphics accelerator, Java code (processor chip) and so on, which also add elegance to the multimedia family.

Another representative event of vigorous development is the launch of AC97 dolby digital surround sound. After vision enters the field of 3D stereoscopic vision space, it also puts forward the requirements of surround and stereo sound effects for hearing. Before paying attention to the big scene, filmmakers will demand realistic sound effects. Coupled with the stimulation of PC games, the demand for sound effects has reached its peak. Under the impetus of this situation, AC97(Audio Codec 97) is produced by Creative Company, the founder of Sound Blaster, and Analog Device, NS, Yamaha and Intel, which are deeply involved in this field. The hardware solution of AC97 consists of two IC's: controller (sound generator) and codec IC.

With the rise of Internet PC (NC) and a new generation of consumer electronic products such as set-top boxes, DVDs, videophones and video conferences, it is emphasized that the best digital signal processing (DSP) for image and communication processing can enter the consulting and consumer multimedia processor market through software-driven configuration after being packaged in another structure.